After a long hibernation, this morning was my first opportunity to return to work in the Common Roots Garden since the final fall harvest. Danny Schwartzman, owner of Common Roots, was up early to help me and fellow volunteer Elise (pictured below) to get some of the early seeds into the ground.

As you can see in the images here, some of the plants from last year (garlic and lettuces) are already coming back on their own. Other pieces of last year’s harvest also remain. A few frozen beets with their bright flesh stuck out from the now-thawed earth, leftover dried bean-pods spilled their contents, and turnips littered the freshly turned soil.

Today’s work went toward planting peas, spinach, arugula, and radishes and re-stringing the twine surrounding the planted beds both to help us know where we’d already planted seeds and to prevent others from walking over the beds. Danny took care of spreading fertilizer over the planted areas, using a liquid sourced naturally from worms fed on coffee grounds.

In its second year, the Common Roots Garden is still in need of volunteers for mulching, planting, and weeding throughout the season. If you lent a hand last year and would like to return again or if you’re looking for a new volunteer opportunity, contact the café at info (at) commonrootscafe (dot) com.

In the Home & Garden section of this week’s New York Times, there’s a short article about people who’ve decided to get rid of their refrigerators. 

For some this means switching to a freezer-only or a mini fridge in lieu of the “normal” giant American fridge, so they’re not totally giving up cooling food. Still, it seems like a decent idea given the energy suck that is the refrigerator. I grew up in a house with not one but TWO of them, so it’s also a pretty radical idea to me.

Today, we have a new fridge in the apartment because I requested that the landlord install one. While the new fridge still has issues that more expensive ones wouldn’t (running water down the back, caking ice in the freezer), I don’t miss the old fridge. Like the one of the women quoted in the article, we do the “easy” environmentally friendly things well-known to most people. I try to replace our incandescent bulbs with the squiggly energy saver ones (even when it looks awful) and we recycle all glass, plastic, cans, and newspaper. Most of the time, we use reusable bags at the store… and when we do get the crappy most-people-throw-away plastic bags, we reuse them instead of buying trash bags. While it’s easy to “do our part” in these ways which don’t inconvenience us too much, I’m not sure I could give up the fridge. In fact, I really wish we had another debatably earth-friendly appliance: a dishwasher. 

Could you get by in a household of 2+ people with just a college dorm fridge?